Touch of Evil: 'At least leaves us with a male character who knows he's done wrong...'

Orson Welles is sacred. All the devout monks of cinema, from film professors to Oscar-earning and yearning directors, revere him. Usually the only point of disagreement is which film to worship above all others. Citizen Kane, for the classicists; Touch of Evil (my personal favourite), for the renegades; or F for Fake, for the post-modernists. Oh, and the wine commercials, for the ironists.

For non-cinephiles and generalists, especially those under 30, Welles is probably desanctified by now, reclassified as secular or, worse, virtually unknown. In a nasty historical joke, his brand of capacious movie-making (which so stylishly demolished the roadblocks of his era's film industry through a combination of personal magnetism, literary wit and cinematic cleverness) has receded into the same old-school wallpaper to which he consigned his enemies. Displaced by a new generation of know-it-alls, Welles no longer commands the brand recognition that once made his name into a national adjective. "Wellesian" used to be a synonym for genius. And hubris. Now it's an adjective in search of a noun.

For film-makers and film critics, though, he is still remembered and revered. Here, the game of matching his name to the appropriate subject can be astonishingly easy. Fame and glory, legacy and respect, women and money, and total artistic (or dictatorial) control are the subjects that "Wellesian" modifies today. Lining up to claim the adjective are every film-maker, every other film-school student, every festival winner, every real or prospective writer-director of "a film by" who wants a piece of the pie and wants it now.

Wait, did I say "every"? Change that to "everyman", or just "man" for short. As the very embodiment of the brilliant writer-director, Welles inaugurated a category that had a Gents Only sign nailed to its door from the beginning, and a clear exclusion policy firmly etched into the playbook. His success in enshrining his own genius created a template that endures today: Welles is shorthand for an unjust system that elevates boy geniuses (mostly white ones) at the expense of women. Fair or not, there is no more time-honoured representative of the punitive system of valorisation and humiliation disguised by the names "film industry" and "indie film" than the extraordinary Mr Welles.

In the spring of 2000, Allison Anders (writer-director of Gas Food Lodging and Things Behind the Sun) convened a seminar in Santa Barbara. Dubbed the Miramar Summit - after the location in which it took place, a hotel notorious back in the 1920s as a getaway for Hollywood stars engaged in activities requiring privacy - the meeting was an emergency session for women working in film. The bungalows were filled with kindred spirits (including this author), there to address the crisis facing women directors in both Hollywood and "Indiewood". The challenge, as always, was how to name the problem without sounding like a crybaby or jinxing all future job prospects.

Anders identified Welles as the source of their predicament. She pronounced the crowd to be suffering obvious symptoms of boy wonder syndrome: that is, the sorry state of being not-a-boy, and therefore not-a-wonder. Now, it was Welles himself who invented an alternative to being a Hollywood hack. The first conscious American auteur, Welles was determined to be his own man, beholden to no one. He'd dazzle the world with his brilliance and technique before going down in flames, the most legendary victim of the studio system, his films re-cut without his permission, his projects cancelled, his ideas stillborn.

In the safe conclave of Santa Barbara, talk buzzed about New York Times articles that detailed how bad things were for women. There was talk, too, of a Sundance report that showd a discrepancy between the men and women who won their first success there: for the guys, it was a year or two to the next feature; for the women, it could take seven years, or more. Since then, a salon.com article has updated the statistics: nothing has changed, except for the worse.

Dr Martha Lauzen, professor of communication at San Diego State University, issues two reports every year, one on film and one on television, analysing the numbers and itemising the bad news that the report titles themselves deliver: The Celluloid Ceiling and Boxed In. Lauzen attended a follow-up Miramar Summit. She'd been analysing the statistics on gender integration in film and TV production long before Miramar; she's been eyeing them, steadfastly, ever since. And crunching the numbers, that great American pastime, proves useful. Lauzen can prove that women aren't imagining things.

Her studies indicate that women's representation has got even worse. Analysing the top 250 films released in 2002, Lauzen found that women directed only 7% of them. She analyses the top 250 grossing films every year, but says she's looked at the bottom, too, and the figures stay the same. And the same for independent film. And the same for television. And for cable. But the guys in charge don't want to believe it. She reports that her conversations with high-rollers in power inevitably lead to the exclamation: "That can't be right." Lauzen has a term for this reaction. She calls it "the privilege of denial". Their position of privilege allows them to deny what women, trying to get meetings with them, would not.

Is it unfair to blame Welles for his posthumous influence? I don't think so. He's the one who laid the groundwork with his propensity for grandiosity and his weakness for self-destruction. Pauline Kael, in her infamous effort to unseat the auteurist juggernaut, devoted a book to Citizen Kane to show, among other things, how outrageously Welles stole credit from his collaborators and hogged the limelight. She ended up just bringing him more attention.

Now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-founder (with her daughter) of a new festival of music, film and video called Don't Knock the Rock, Anders explained her update on Welles: "This mythology doesn't help anyone. It encourages the promotion of film-makers who dazzle, and who were raised by women whom they dazzled as little boys. Celebrity is terribly intoxicating to that kind of personality: they're made for it, but they're not grounded. Welles grew up wealthy, he was raised by his mother to be a prince, to be the centre of attention." Admitting that the Welles myth damaged him, too, Anders is more pointed about the damage to women: "For a woman ever to be called a genius, she really has to be one. They don't use that word for us. But somehow genius is a phrase that men get anointed with so very easily. I don't know why, but the film business always seems to want one of these. It must be some kind of transference, so the studio guys think that they're geniuses, too, for discovering them."

When it comes to aesthetics, the Wellesian plague is cleverness. Look for a film that seems to know too much for its own good and you're on the track of a Welles wannabe. Look for a film that treats its women badly, too, and you won't be far off. Citizen Kane is a successful power grab because Welles, determined to score a hit on evil old Mr Hearst, went for his woman. It's the oldest game in the book. Poor Marion Davies was lampooned mercilessly. Critic Molly Haskell argues that Davies had been a terrific comic actress in the early King Vidor movies, before Hearst insisted on hand-picking more serious roles for her; after Kane, nobody could take her seriously. Peter Bogdanovich, Welles's best-known acolyte, was still playing the same game in The Cat's Meow a few years back. It's a classic male game, this trashing one another to advance on the power line, with wives and mistresses treated as property to be devalued along the way.

Cleverness, grandiosity, no use for women. A killer instinct for the sucker punch. A pathological need for attention that makes behind-the-camera insufficient without add-ons (screenwriter, on-screen talent, whatever). Up-to-the-minute technology and a strong aesthetics of style. A magician's touch. It's easy to spot the Wellesian rabbit trick, and just as easy to identify the boy wonders of today. Quentin Tarantino, above all, has the same appetite for devouring influences, deploying cinematic acrobatics and getting carte blanche on the basis of genius. Kevin Smith has the vanity, but perhaps not the eye. James Cameron, self-proclaimed king of the world, is the money-shot version. Darren Aronofsky, with his split screens and cerebral angst, broadcasts his desired lineage. David Fincher is a shoo-in, from his elegant structures to his deployment of grand philosophical themes embedded right out in the open where critics can find them. Don't forget Gaspar Noe, so eager for attention, all structure and shock. Above all, there's the leader of the pack: Lars von Trier, with his retooled genres and multiple camera tricks and that ingenious self-promotion machine, Dogme 95. Geniuses all, no doubt. It must be true if they say it themselves.

Before Welles, there were women who made films. Old news, I know. Yeah, yeah, Dorothy Arzner. But until last year's retrospective mounted by the Kinotek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt, who knew that Germaine Dulac had made more than a dozen riveting films, or that she'd co-founded the Cinemathèque Française with Henri Langlois? And until Cari Beauchamp's wonderfully titled history, Without Lying Down, who knew there had been a whole gang of women screenwriters gathered around Frances Marion, or that Marion had wielded real power in Hollywood?

That was before sound came in and budgets went up, before production was consolidated and women pushed out. Anders proudly keeps a copy of an old article proclaiming Lois Weber to be a "girl wonder", a term not much in evidence today. The boy wonder syndrome, as practised by Welles and those who followed like puppies in his footsteps, changed the game and finessed the rules. For women today, directing films is like playing against the house in a Vegas casino. The odds suck, the game is rigged. No wonder Welles appears in his favourite guise in F for Fake: a magician, who makes the key to the kingdom and the coin of the realm appear and disappear for a little boy's wonderment.

"Citizen Kane was great," says Anders. "But it was only one film." True. Actually, there's a reason I prefer Touch of Evil. Women are victims in both, and pawns of the men. But in Kane, Welles isn't self-conscious about what he's doing. He has, instead, the righteousness of youth. Perhaps Laura Mulvey's BFI monograph on Citizen Kane hits it right on the oedipal target, and the spectre that haunts the film is the figure of the mother. Perhaps the film's great strength is the subconscious identification that pulled Welles into his own web. A Welles film could only ever be a film about a male hero, whether one diminished by a woman or one who diminished himself, yet Touch of Evil at least leaves us with a male character who knows he's done wrong, that he's lied and squandered his power. It's the end of the line for sheriff Hank Quinlan and, as it turned out, for the film-noir genre that reached its apogee here. The fact that Quinlan was played by Welles renders our suspicions of over-identification, well, over-determined. Like all the male protagonists in all of Welles's master narratives, Quinlan has to be the centre of the tragedy he's created. A woman could never occupy the centre. Dietrich is on the sidelines: always the audience, never the hero.

Dietrich's final judgment of Quinlan is correct, of course: Welles was some kind of man, all right. Ever since, cinematic genius has been cut to his corpulent measure. And the women just can't have it, not off screen, not even on. Rita Hayworth, his about-to-be-ex-wife, is left fragmented in the fun-house, while Dietrich, inexplicably loyal, gets to stay alive so she can deliver the eulogy.

My great aunt spoke English with the unconscious hilarity of the immigrant; when she praised her male family, they were declared "genies". As a child, I'd imagine them popping out of Aladdin's lamp, granting wishes. Now I understand that it's the boy wonders themselves who receive all the grants, all the wishes and all the praise, and how I wish I could get them back into the bottle. Then, perhaps women directors could get their half-a-chance to succeed.